Word: snow
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Suddenly, after days of swamping snow, the morning of Japan's Fourth of July--its national holiday, commemorating the nation's founding 2,658 years ago--dawned birthday blue. Tae Satoya, a 21-year-old from Sapporo who had never won a major competition and had finished only 11th in the first of her two runs, bumped and jangled over the women's moguls course. Then she just stood there and, with an air of excited surprise, watched champion after champion fail to beat her score. Just seven months before, soon after the world championship, her father had died...
...champions waited, because everyone was tapping fingers a little in the early days of the Nagano Games, and an occasional hint of loss, frustration and anxiety flavored the opening moments. The glamorous, made-for-TV showcase of the men's downhill was postponed and postponed and postponed again, as snow gave way to sleet gave way to rain. Delay after delay left the athletes fractious, and fans who had traveled from distant islands to watch the Games found themselves standing in strong winter monsoons. The Olympic Village waited and waited to see Paul Kariya, the Canadian hockey star of Japanese...
Most embarrassing of all, the unlikely May-December alliance between the separatist snowboarders and the International Olympic Committee hardly survived even its honeymoon, as the aged judges said they would revoke the first snow-surfing gold medal ever--when traces of marijuana were found in Canada's Ross Rebagliati, winner of the men's giant slalom--and then were overruled, marking a triumph for rebellion. One foot was speeding forward, it seemed; the other was staying in place...
Everywhere, it seemed, the regular guys took over. Roughly 750 soldiers in camouflage fatigues worked through the night to clear what looked like feet of fresh snow from the slopes. Cashiers consulted dictionaries between customers, and even the local organized-crime syndicates agreed to observe an Olympic truce. At the luge spiral, fans sat on banks of snow in earflaps, letting out cries of delight and astonishment as contestants whooshed past in 80-m.p.h. gusts of air. As cheering fellow lugers raised Hackl, lifting the perennial champion to their shoulders, a competing smile played out on the face...
...about doping scandals and billion-dollar bullet trains, and when the eye makes out giant Coke bottles in the middle of white Alpine silence. Indeed, one by-product of last week's reminder that nature doesn't bend to bullet-train schedules was that suddenly curling, unsmudged by the snow, appeared on Channel 36 in Nagano, and then on Channel 48 and Channel 47, the camera trained on competitors who looked like your Uncle Bob and the sound track made up of nothing but their curses, asides and excited cries of "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" (a technical term, one was told...